Hump Day Video: Fido vs Spot — Animal vs Robot

This is cool: Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot - SAFFiR

Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot - SAFFiR 

Video: Project Silent NEMO • Shark-Like Submersible Spy Vehicle

The video tile calls the submersible robot shark-like. I think it is meant to look like a blue fin tune.

Harvard’s School for Engineering cuts cord on soft robots...

Via The Harvard Gazette: 

When it comes to soft robots, researchers have finally managed to cut the cord.
Developers from Harvard’s School for Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have produced the first untethered soft robot — a quadruped that can stand up and walk away from its designers.
Working in the lab of Robert Wood, the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a team of researchers that included Kevin Galloway, Michael Karpelson, Bobak Mosadegh, Robert Shepherd, Michael Tolley, and Michael Wehner was able to scale up earlier soft-robot designs, enabling a single robot to carry on its back all the equipment it needs to operate — micro-compressors, control systems, and batteries. The design is described in a paper in Soft Robotics that appeared online Sept. 1.
“Earlier versions of soft robots were all tethered, which works fine in some applications, but what we wanted to do was challenge people’s concept of what a robot has to look like,” said Tolley, a research associate in materials science and mechanical engineering at the Wyss Institute and the study’s first author. “We think the reason people have settled on using metal and rigid materials for robots is because they’re easier to model and control. This work is very inspired by nature, and we wanted to demonstrate that soft materials can also be the basis for robots.”

Video of the Day: Robot WildCat Runs 16 MPH

Fidel Castro wants to replace Obama with a socialist robot or something

 
Obama robot pics on Sodahead

Fidel Castro has definitely lost that "Hope and Change" feeling.

(AFP) — Cuban revolutionary icon Fidel Castro said Monday that a “robot” would be better in the White House than President Barack Obama — or any of the Republicans candidates in the 2012 election race.

“Is it not obvious that the worst of all is the absence in the White House of a robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war that would end the life of our species?” Castro, 85, wrote in one of the “reflections” he often publishes in Cuba’s state-controlled media.

Under the title “The Best President for the United States,” Cuba’s ex-president said that if faced with a choice between Obama, a Republican rival or a robot, “90 percent of voting Americans, especially Hispanics, blacks and the growing number of the impoverished middle class, would vote for the robot.”

Obama, Castro said, is “hopelessly immersed in seeking re-election,” and “the dreams of (civil rights icon) Martin Luther King are thousands of light years further away than the nearest inhabitable planet.” Read more here..

Strange Video: ‘Gay Robot’ Heckles Bachmann At Iowa Event

 File this one under: Liberals are weird.

RoboProf v. Bachmann